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Programming In a Nutshell
One of the first things I learned about computer programming is that if it works, it works. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how smart they are or what their name is. You need to do the experiment.
In college, I failed a coding assignment because my teacher said my code would not work. Back then access to a computer room was for advanced students. So I bribed my way on to the DEC PDP-10 late at night and keyed in my program. Then I dragged my famous professor into the computer room.
“This should not work,” he said. But he changed my grade to an A. Years later he offered me a job at startup Evans & Sutherland. They were working out of a shack, and I was not impressed, so I turned down the job — a galactically stupid mistake.
Ok, so I thought of a patent a month ago. I made a guess. Don’t laugh. Then I tried to write it, but it would not work. Still, I knew it should work if I could solve the road blocks. Tonight it worked. It passed experiment. It worked like a charm, and now I know it’s patentable. I’ll open source the solution in a followup article on Medium/Github.
Now if it did not work with experiment, it would have been wrong. That is a valuable lesson. Programming is a lot like Science in General. That’s why it’s called Computer Science. Here is my favorite teacher explaining this in a nutshell. I learned to program from a physics professor. Sounds crazy, but he was the best science teacher of all time.
